Watching some of the videos during development of XP10 and reading on this and other forums about custom scenery..Think about it, you could make a variety of different types of interstate lights.. If you can remove the auto generated lights in interchanges and put the larger lights that would shine down and brighten a larger area..Model fast food restaurant chain buildings.. Maybe one or two varieties for four or five resteraunts and put them in their locations around a city..Model large home improvement stores, or Wally-Worlds.. It would be a single building (cause they are almost all alike) and then just put them in their locations..Just ideas, on how to make cities more lifelike with as little work as possible..Any ideas??

• Change the cookie-cutter homes which seem to fill the landscape to a more diverse set of homes and yards. It seems like every neighborhood in the X-Plane demo is cast from the same 1950's development mold. Using one set of autogenerated homes to represent all types looks fluky.
• Change how the scenery engine populates homes and trees to better distribute them across wider areas when detail levels are set lower. The suspension of disbelief when flying over suburbia is quickly smashed when you see a street with houses practically on top of one another, but then a series of neighborhood roads right next to it snaking around for no apparent reason, with no homes or other scenery except for an occasional tree.
• Reduce the harshness that the roadways currently overlay the terrain - it's quite jarring to fly over city, neighborhood, or rural streets and have them be that contrasted so well with the underlying terrain.
• Smooth some roadway intersections and curves - either the mapping data is a little rough, or the scenery engine can't smooth the curves. It makes the roads look like afterthoughts.
• Do a better job defining industrial areas from retail areas from commercial areas from suburbia.

Just a few thoughts for the X-Plane team! Not entirely along the vein you might have been looking for, but ideas none the less! Solve some of these issues, and cities will start looking better by default!-Greg

Well, I can assure you, that we at the scenery dev team are not blind, and have so many ideas (your list would be covered by that) about how things could be better. BUT, remember, we don't have unlimited time/resources at our hands to achieve it all at the same time ... or it would mean, that we would need unlimited time/resources ... which would mean, that the sim would take indefinitely to be finish :) So, we decide from time to time to release something to you (so you can have fun now, and not in the indefinite future) ... but even then, we still keep improving. Nevertheless, thanks for you suggestions (but don't expect them to be in the next update in the coming days ).

Thanks for the input, Al. Personally, I know that there are always tradeoffs, time limits, and budget constraints. For some reason the much touted "plausible world" for rendering scenery isn't quite cutting it for me. Perhaps I'm too used to the way things look in the "other" simulator, but I'll be keeping my eyes open to see what comes of it in the XP world.Although I am pretty well invested in the "other" side of flight simulation right now, I'm trying my best not to be a sycophant who shoots down any efforts by Laminar in an effort to justify my preferences or prior purchases.Something more along the lines of the original poster's idea would be very strong tools for quick scenery development. Upon hearing that airports would be devoid of any default buildings and just be barren patches of asphalt and concrete, the need for an easy to use GUI based tool to add in scenery objects becomes a must... if you're familiar with the "Instant Scenery" tools available for MSFS, you have an idea of what I'm aiming at.We'll see how it goes!-Greg

Heh, yeah would be cool to get out the wacom table with pressure sensitive pen and just start rubbing away over the landscape, less pressure and less dense housing, more pressure and denser housing popping up over your drawing area. I bet you god get through the landscape fairly quickly like that.

It wouldn't be instant scenery.. But if you made a Home Depot, or a Lowes, since they are almost all identical.. You could simply make one and put all 12 of them around the city.. Same thing for fast food chains.. I'm not saying this should have been addressed during development.. But it would sure be simple for us (the fans) to make and put in..

Something more along the lines of the original poster's idea would be very strong tools for quick scenery development. Upon hearing that airports would be devoid of any default buildings and just be barren patches of asphalt and concrete, the need for an easy to use GUI based tool to add in scenery objects becomes a must... if you're familiar with the "Instant Scenery" tools available for MSFS, you have an idea of what I'm aiming at.

The answer to your question is WED (World Editor), the tool from Laminar, that should help you here.Especially with the new "Lego bricks" approach, it should be quite easy to populate airports with some good looking 3D clutter (and thats exactly the idea behind this new feature in the upcoming, next version of WED). .. So, this wish should be granted quite soon(ish) (you can read about this in many of the other threads here).

Great suggestions guys. I have no detailed idea of the new WED but doing such scattering should be very easy.!as usual it's the 3d modelling that is the hard part. Check out http://www.opensceneryx.com/, examples of free scenery objects place able in xplane. Like everyone, 10 has big implications for design of objects ESP night texture options, but in time it'll be done.

• Change the cookie-cutter homes which seem to fill the landscape to a more diverse set of homes and yards. It seems like every neighborhood in the X-Plane demo is cast from the same 1950's development mold. Using one set of autogenerated homes to represent all types looks fluky.
• Change how the scenery engine populates homes and trees to better distribute them across wider areas when detail levels are set lower. The suspension of disbelief when flying over suburbia is quickly smashed when you see a street with houses practically on top of one another, but then a series of neighborhood roads right next to it snaking around for no apparent reason, with no homes or other scenery except for an occasional tree.
• Reduce the harshness that the roadways currently overlay the terrain - it's quite jarring to fly over city, neighborhood, or rural streets and have them be that contrasted so well with the underlying terrain.
• Smooth some roadway intersections and curves - either the mapping data is a little rough, or the scenery engine can't smooth the curves. It makes the roads look like afterthoughts.
• Do a better job defining industrial areas from retail areas from commercial areas from suburbia.

Just a few thoughts for the X-Plane team! Not entirely along the vein you might have been looking for, but ideas none the less! Solve some of these issues, and cities will start looking better by default!-Greg

I think I saw the Simpsons house down there.Bob